Many food products, including but not limited to chips, bars, snacks, crackers, wafers, flat breads, cookies, biscuits, breads, bagels, cakes, muffins, waffles, pancakes, french fries, meat analogs, pasta, pastries, and doughnuts, have developed/evolved over the centuries with a focus on carbohydrate-based material formulations. This focus on carbohydrates (including but not limited to flour, sugar, starch, and derivatives of such) and their functional properties has had a major impact on manufacturing processes and equipment. Equipment materials of construction, equipment design, material handling requirements and systems, process design, recipe creation and product formulation have all developed around carbohydrate-based product formulation. Most importantly, though, these carbohydrate-based product formulations have made a permanent impact on the mind of the consumer regarding food product taste, texture, and mouth-feel. Unfortunately, this focus on carbohydrate-based foods has also had other unwanted consequences, including an out-of-control increase in obesity, irritable bowel syndrome, diabetes, and lethargy. Many of these diseases are scientifically linked to the high-carbohydrate diet common in the western hemisphere.
As a result, the need for changes to the high-carbohydrate diet has become critical for the general publics' long-term health and wellness. The difficulty with enacting the necessary product formulation changes is that a change in food ingredients is usually not simple, nor just an easy substitution of one ingredient for another. Foods must still be palatable and digestible, and the products must be capable of being successfully processed on existing manufacturing equipment, ranging from home kitchen appliances to large industrial scale equipment. Additionally, this material technology must be balanced, for it needs to not only meet the requirements of the equipment, but it must ultimately yield a food product with taste, texture and mouth-feel characteristics similar to existing carbohydrate-based food products.
Any new food material technology would thus need to be multifunctional, requiring it to both process and taste similar to carbohydrates. Also, in order to be processed, such foods would need to emulate the material characteristics exhibited by high-carbohydrate foods, including possessing controllable extensibility/elongation, volume expansion, and adhesion properties needed to be processable in common food manufacturing processes, including direct reduction sheeting, lamination sheeting, extrusion, and various molding processes. The processed food materials need to be physically subjected to equipment handling, various extrusion techniques, and thickness reduction methods on automated process equipment to measurements ranging from 300 mm to as little as 0.10 mm. Standard carbohydrate materials technology, used for these common food processes, has been mastered over centuries of engineering, work, and effort. Therefore, these processes and the equipment have been designed for processing of high-carbohydrate products. There is thus a great need for a material base change in food processing which will yield good tasting, economical, high-protein, reduced high glycemic/simple carbohydrate foods.